An American Lion

Where is the pouncing cheetah? Oh, he’s over there, ignoring the truth about President Obama’s first year in office…

This comes from James Fallows at the Atlantic:

A friend who has worked in and written about politics for nearly 40 years writes with this question about assessments of Obama’s “disappointing” first year:

“How can the MSM (what’s left of it) not “get” that disappointment in Obama over “lack of change” is precisely the object of the GOP in blocking change?  Does no one remember Newt Gingrich and the GOP strategy from 1992 to 1994, which actually worked?  How can the GOP steal second and third in one play AGAIN and not get nailed this time?  I want to scream.  In any sensible society, instead of disappointment in Obama there would be intense anger at the GOP, and they’d be forced to knock it off.”

The talk about “any sensible society” of course leads us into the realm of what is fancily known as counterfactual theorizing…

That’s an excellent assessment of the culpability of the media, but it misses the fact that President Obama enabled his opponents to get up from the mat and come back at him. In what they used to call “professional wrestling,” this is akin to taking a few moments to preen for the crowd before finishing off an opponent. That gives the nearly beaten wrestler a chance to shake off the cobwebs and procure a folding chair from ringside. The end result is a walloping bang! across the shoulder blades and, the next thing you know, someone else gets to wear the championship belt.

Obstructionism is exactly what the Democrat Party really failed to accomplish during President Bush’s time in office. Had there been more of that, the Democrat Party could now claim to have been trying to give us good government. Instead, it became a willing partner in the looting of the treasury. Why, for example, did they go along with the Iraq War? Why, for example, did they go along with the stripping away of any and all privacy rights? Why, for example, did they comply with Bush’s wishes on nearly ever budget, up to and including spending us into an oblivion we will never get out of? There wasn’t one Democrat with the courage to stop the process and bring sanity to the table? The legacy of Ted Kennedy is not that he wasn’t a great person, surely, he was. The legacy of Ted Kennedy is that he didn’t life a goddamned finger to do much of anything to thwart George W. Bush when he should have been thwarting him like it was nobody’s business. In contrast, there are forty Republicans who are not worth one tenth of a Ted Kennedy fighting to be the one to stop this Health Care bill process, if only to continue the insanity of not fixing a broken system. Don’t blame the media for that. Blame it on a lack of intestinal fortitude.

No one did more to save the Republican Party in early 2009 than President Obama. He repeatedly allowed them to have a seat at a table which wasn’t theirs to ask for. He had momentum, a mandate, and more goodwill than any President in my memory (wasn’t around for Roosevelt, except for the first 10 months or so of my life). He had a honeymoon, the attention of the Congress, Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, and a leadership there that was ideologically prepared to embrace his agenda. Jimmy Carter had to deal with Tip O’Neill. If President Obama had to deal with Tip O’Neill, we’d hear crying and moaning from his underlings on a daily basis. 

He squandered it. Really, what have they done after being swept into office by an unprecedented acclimation? They give speeches. They give some of the best speeches you will ever hear. He doesn’t do anything other than that.